Video transcript

(piano music playing) Voiceover: We're at the
l'Orangerie in Paris and we're looking at one of
Monet's Water Lily rooms. Voiceover: It's in an
oval shape lit from above. Voiceover: Through a scrim which
gives it a really lovely soft light. There is this sense that
these are contemplative works which ties them in an interesting
way as to a kind of solemnity of the sort that you would
expect in a religious context. Voiceover: No doubt, this is
painted late in Monet's life. after the death of his wife
and after the death of his son. So, I think there is a
sense for him of his legacy. Voiceover: He gave them
to the French state and the state in turn decided
to build this pavilion for them. Voiceover: I keep thinking
about Monet's lifelong desire to capture the beauty of the optical world from when he was in Paris
and then in Argenteuil and thinking back to the
Boulevard des Capucines and the light flooding
down the boulevards, to the Gare Saint Lazare and the light filter through
the steam of the trains and then later in his life, in
his garden with the water lilies. Voiceover: He was interested not
only in capturing and understanding and rendering those effects
of light and the momentary but actually in creating them. You know, he devoted an
enormous amount of his life to actually planting these
gardens and maintaining them and then translating them onto canvas and in the sense preserving
that sense of the momentary. Voiceover: The thing that I keep
thinking about as we look at this and the intensity of the color and
the beauty of the color harmony is that the paintings are
more beautiful than reality. So, let's think about that for a second
in the history of landscape painting. I mean, these are
unprecedented in that way. First of all their shape is this very,
very long panels without a horizon line. Voiceover: Right, we're looking
across the waters so we see neither the ground we stand on
nor the horizon on the far side. Voiceover: Traditional landscape
painting often provided a path for one's eye to travel
through a landscape and here we really can't do
that because we're confronted with the surface of the water, the surface of the paintings themselves. Voiceover: But I do think that
Monet is borrowing actually from the classical tradition
of landscape painting. If you look on both the
sides of these canvases you see the dark shadows
of the weeping willows and those function in a sense the way
trees often framed recessionary landscapes by Claude or by [unintelligble]. Monet has placed us in
a very particular place. Obviously we're on the shore in some way but we're looking across
the waters so that we see neither the ground that we stand on nor the horizon on the far side. Now, Monet had just enlarged his ponds but even then they're quite small. And so, he's really unmoored us by
not giving us ground to stand on. But he has given us a
very particular angle at which we're viewing the pads
and the water lilies themselves and that does place us in relationship
to the surface of the water. And so we actually can locate ourselves and they also allow us to
sort of hop, skip and jump from pad to pad and move back into space. And then this extraordinary
volume of space below the pond and the incredible dome of space above where those towering
clouds right above us. And so this sense of the extent
of the volume that's portrayed and yet done so on the
2-dimensional surface of the pond which is of course a reflection of the
2-dimensional surface of the canvas is a beautiful through
summation of this notion that Monet has worked towards for so long. How does one capture both
the abstraction of modern art and yet also still make room for
the volume that our eye knows? Voiceover: There's something
really sublime here. We have the infinity of that depth and there's also a sense of the
infinite in the sky and the clouds and that speaks back to
that religious sense. While he's capturing the transitory there's a sense of permanence and
transcendence at the same time. Voiceover: I think that's actually
a perfect way to state it. Let's take a really
close look at the paint. The surface is incredibly
rich and rough and built up. You can see this kind of dry brush that Monet has sort of
hold the paint across. And what seems to happen is the
paint comes off on the ridges that are already there making
those even more prominent. Voiceover: Well, it's almost
as a sculptural surface that helps to create some senses
of volume as you look across it. Toward late in his career he wasn't so
interested in capturing things quickly. He wanted to be able
to return to a painting and continue to work it. He's finding a solution to that problem and creating a studio out of doors where he can continue to work the surface and so, it does have
that feeling of something that has layers and layers of paint
where the paint has been allowed to dry and then he's put on new layers. Voiceover: When we stand
close to this canvas and we see those layers of paint and we see the way they almost
like a tapestry lie over each other so that we can see the
paint between strokes and the colors are not so
much blended as overlaid. Voiceover: It's hard not to
think about all of repainting and Jackson Pollock, the way that the
painting occupies our field of vision and how did he escape that field of
vision in order to paint the landscape. You can almost imagine this
way that the painting becomes as I think it is for Jackson
Pollock, a world unto itself that the artist enters and exists within. And we do too actually within
this space of this room. Voiceover: Well, that's a
really critical point, you know? What begins to happen with the
early modern certainly with Matisse and Picasso and ultimately I
think with people like Pollock and maybe here too is the
conversation ceases to be a dialogue between the artist and its subject and becomes ultimately a dialogue
between the artist and the canvas. And that seems to have happened here. It's a beautiful result. (piano music playing)